as possible was exercised by the issuing houses which fathered them. Probably investors follow a trusting faith in the issuing house and perhaps after all this is the safest guide with foreign issues, for those who really know the records of the issuing houses. Still I must confess a preference for a mature vintage not only in foreign debt but in industrials. A debtor who has paid and a company that has earned for half a century or even for twenty years, and has stood the shock of 1907 and the cataclysms of 1914 and 1921 has an aroma, like a bottle that is whiskered with honourable cobwebs.
When we come to the detailed points to be desired in any particular form of oversea public debt that we may be considering they will evidently be the same as those mentioned in discussing Home Public Debts, with one important addition. We shall want either a definite date of repayment or regular redemption by drawings or purchase, so that so much of the loan is definitely cancelled every year, or else possibly, in the case of a highly favoured borrower, a perpetual debt. What we do not want is a loan which carries an option in favour of the debtor, so that it may be repaid, after a certain date, if and when it suits his convenience, which it will only
